Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday May 21, 2010 @03:02PM
from the if-you're-gonna-go,-go-big dept.

PurpleCarrot writes "In what must be one of the largest attempts to scrape images from the Web, the site ImageLogr.com 'claims to be scraping the entire "free web" and seems to have hit Flickr especially hard, copying full-sized images of yours and mine to their own servers, where they are hosting them without any attribution or links back to the original image in violation of all available licenses on Flickr.' The site even contains the option to directly download images that ImageLogr has scraped. What makes this endeavor so amazing is that it isn't a case of 'other people gave us millions of infringing images, help us remove the wrong ones,' but one of 'we took all the images on the Web; if we got one of yours, oops!' The former gets some protection from the DMCA, whereas the latter is blatant infringement. ImageLogr's actions have caused a flurry of activity, and the site's owners have subsequently taken it offline, displaying the following message: 'Imagelogr.com is currently offline as we are improving the website. Due to copyright issues we are now changing some stuff around to make people happy. Please check back soon.'"

Not exactly. Underneath the images is the domain name where the image resides, and if you click on the image it still takes you to the page with a frame on top displaying the smaller version of the image.

Frames are the right way to do it, and I applaud Google for using them instead of listening to pseudo-engineer web designers who think they know anything yukking it up about how frames are so five years ago.

Can we just make a rule that any image you post on the internet doesn't belong to you anymore? Anyone with any sense already figured that out a decade ago anyway.

Perhaps we can do that with text, too, since there really is no difference in text and photos in this context. Of course, that means that all worthwhile content will disappear, such as news websites, individual blogs, Google Earth, Maps, etc.

The complaint isn't about getting paid, it is about attribution. I release most of my personal photography under CC with attribution. I have also written many nasty letters to competitors who lift our images from our website to use on competing websites. (we shoot everything, even stuff I can get manufacturer's photos of, to insure we have a unique look). The reason I do this is not only because I don't like working for free for other companies, but it dilutes our efforts to maintain a unique look. That and I don't need someone competing with me unless they are willing to spend the same amount of resources into photography that we have. ie: I don't want to subsidize my own competition.

So, no, I think I should be able to keep the copyright on stuff I create.

I know, maybe we should just DRM everything!1!!1 That'll solve the problem.

No offense, man, but the universe doesn't owe you copyright. And unfortunately, the tradition of copyright depends on copying being hard. Now that it's easy, there's really no way to prevent people from doing this. You can send them nasty letters, but the water's coming in faster than you can bail. Like every other content producer, eventually you're going to have to learn to make money from the people who are willing to pa

And unfortunately, the tradition of copyright depends on copying being hard. Now that it's easy, there's really no way to prevent people from doing this.

Umm... I have to call BS on your "tradition of copyright." Copyright wasn't created until movable type on presses made mass "copying" possible and relatively easy to do. The "tradition of copyright" came into being when copying became easy. So, various governments stepped in and made such things illegal (for a limited time, anyway) to enable creators and publishers a little time to make a profit.

I'll admit that the combination of digital formats for data and the internet has made it easier to distribut

The problem is that most people who use a camera take snapshots, not photographs. Given the explosion in digital photography over the last decade, I'd wager that a vanishingly small number of times a shutter is pressed out of the billions total does it get pressed by someone who is trying to create art, whether commercial or otherwise.

Most people don't care about their photos, their snapshots. There's no effort to create them. There was no thought put into the composition, no setup to speak of.. it's just a snapshot. And, as such, most of the people do not understand why it is a big deal that anyone should care about photos. The public does not realize that it costs potentially a lot of money and time to create professional images. Witness some of the comments on this Slashdot thread.

I applaud the parent poster for caring enough to make that effort, and for taking the time to defend their work against dilution. It's a mark of professionalism and high quality that likely pervades the rest of his operation.

The public does not realize that it costs potentially a lot of money and time to create professional images. Witness some of the comments on this Slashdot thread.

Witness this comment: I know precisely how much work can go into creating professional images - I've been to more than a few professional photo shoots because I have family members in the business - and the overhead of support crew and the time spent to get just a handful of perfect shots can be enormous (if the photog works that way). But copyright is not about how much effort goes into creating a work, if it did then the phone book would be copyrightable.

There will always be a market for commercial photography because it is by far a commission-based business. A world without copyright would be make stock-photography, which admittedly some people consider their bread-and-butter, less profitable but would have the effect of boosting the business for commissioned work since less stock photos would be available. Furthermore there will always be artistic photography because real art needs to express itself in the way irrelevant to money in the way artists like van Gogh did.

So, while I'm all for proper attribution, that doesn't mean that copyright in anything like its current form is necessary to the modern world. Even if it does personally benefit guys like the GP by protecting his business.

The only issue I have with your perspective is that to judge what is "art", "commercial art" and "just some snapshot" is rather subjective. Technically, they are all equally protected under the law, which I think is a good thing. I CHOOSE to release most of my personal, non-commercial photos under a very permissive license (I have put up over one hundred on Wikipedia, for example), but it is my choice to make.

My understanding that if you take a snapshot and publish it in the U.S., then it is copyright pro

Thank you. I'm a photographer that has some pics up on flickr and picasa, but I don't put my full best quality version of any image on either site ever. The moment I do, I know it's 100% completely and totally out of my hands, no matter what "technology" a site claims to have in place to prevent it.

Frankly, I LIKE that the web works that way. That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's the BEST feature of the internet. Anyone using the internet would be well served to learn how to use it to their advantage and h

So if you post a photo of yourself, your wife, your kids, or some other loved one, are you ok with some ad company using that photo in an ad campaign of theirs (no matter what the product) without asking for your permission or giving you any monetary compensation? I know I'm not. Just because I post something on the Internet doesn't mean I've given up my copyright ownership of the item.

(Albeit, it's literally impossible to look at something on the web without making a local copy, at least in RAM, which may be saved to a temporary file on disk and retained for years, or until the authorities toss out your hard drive because the retention period for evidence in your case has lapsed...)

Copying something and serving it to the public are two very different things.

Can we just make a rule that any image you post on the internet doesn't belong to you anymore? Anyone with any sense already figured that out a decade ago anyway.

Only if you want to see all of the professional and most of the amateur content on the internet yanked overnight. While the current "intellectual property" laws are absurd, reasonable, limited term copyrights do actually benefit both the creators and the common good.

Try this thought experiment: In the absence of copyright and also the absence of net neutrality -- we're 50% there already -- then everyone's creative work ends up being copied by a few large media corporations and made available only through their sites. Forget direct access; the handful of megacorporate ISPs won't provide it for sites that don't pay their fees. Forget about any payment or even credit to the creators. Independent creators are essentially frozen out, and the general public just gets the same kind of bland, focus group tested crap that ends up on television.

Thanks, but I'll pass. Comcast and Verizon are bad enough as they are. I don't want to find out what they'd be like with a monopoly on all networked content.

Hell, I'll just "copy" your identity too. It's just information, and information wants to be free!

Feel free. However, if you lie for financial gain, that's fraud. Identity theft isn't a crime. If someone asks me my name and I tell them "George Bush" I won't be arrested (unless I'm lying to a government official in certain capacities). It's when I go to the bank and tell them I'm George Bush in order to steal the bank's money that it becomes a crime. I have no problem with someone stealing my identity

Can't we just make a rule that this tired strawman argument doesn't belong to anyone anymore, since it's a worthless analogy? We're taking about: A) digital data that is copied without disturbing the original, and B) Once you've posted it in a public place (aka the internet), it's there essentially *to* be shared and copied, that was the PURPOSE of the internet.

Perhaps a better analogy for you: When you go to Times Square with you camera, do you intentionally frame your shots to avoid taking photos of any o

Except there's a pretty clear difference between me coming up with the oh-so-neat number "462826674840809873425894986513859764213550" independently, or just copy/pasting it from your post into mine. And I swear I came up with that same number all by myself, too!

If you store anything on the internet, what you are storing is a number. People most certainly are allowed to recreate the number 462826674840809873425894986513859764213550 even if I have declared it to be my own and stored it in a house with unlocked doors.

[sarcasm]
Yeah, no kidding. For example, some guy wrote a book and it exists in digital format: "2983529087897329872394928734". I took that number and changed the first four digits, so it's "1212529087897329872394928734". Now, they call me a plagar

I tried to reroute their encryptions by directly typing http://www.imagelogr.com/images [imagelogr.com] into the address bar, but it just gave me a 404 error. Maybe they already baleeted all the images.

It's kind of strange. Wouldn't you need a lot of money to be able to afford the resources that retrieving and storing all these images require? If you are willing to invest in that kind of operation wouldn't you at least consider the legal implications that kind of service needs to deal with?

If I were to do something like, I wouldn't store anything. I would leave the image stored on Flickr and then just rewrite the url through some type of proxy server that makes it appear as if it is coming from my server.

If you don't want a work you created completely out of your control you copyright it, then you pursue infringement processes against those who willfully violate your rights. How hard is this? It isn't, except the owners of this site allegedly took a huge chunk of the images accessible via the web and did not respect the rights of their creators at all.

Many people are not asking for "complete control". Lots are just asking for attribution. Others want more than that and that's their ri

If someone walked by my house and the doors and windows flew open and started throwing out my items to the passer-by, like web servers do, then yes, it would be my fault for installing windows and doors.

If you want to protect your content, only give it to people whom you want to have it. Web servers do not have to grant access to everyone.

I like how they say they are trying to "make people happy" as if it's just some minor bureaucrat the need to appease when it's more like "we flagrantly broke the law and are trying to get out of Dodge!"

The problem with your logic is that they aren't just scraping images from people that pirate movies, they're scraping images from everyone. Your question would be better posed as: Since everyone in the world downloads music and movies without paying, why can't they scrape your images and serve them up to "whomever?"

Revised, I think the question pretty much answers itself. Otherwise, in order for your question to have a logical foundation, everyone needs to be allowed to pirate music and movies, or they need

1) People who don't infringe media copyrights but post pictures to Facebook et al. Not a vanishing minority, btw.2) People who infringe media copyrights, post pictures, and don't see it as hypocritical for any number of fractionally-assed reasons (or shallow rationales, if you wish).

The former category, you are obviously not addressing. So either you lack sympathy for them for some other unspecified reason, or don't care about them because their existence doesn't support the logic of your assertion. In the latter case, they're precisely what you're talking about, but they don't think they do. And denial is a powerful force.

Hell, a truly rational observer would conclude that hypocrisy might not be bad; that, in fact, it's an absolute requirement for social interaction. If you can act politely to someone you'd just as soon strangle, that's a mild (and socially necessary) form of hypocrisy.

Imagelogr.com is an image & picture search engine. We try to index pretty much every picture & image currently available on the free internet. With our powerful search engine finding these images should be fairly easy. We also offer a few image manipulation tools to stand out from the competition.

I'm confused, but I haven't dug through their schema at all, so, if they're an index, don't they have some sort of cross-referencing information to tell you where the picture came from or what it's a picture of? If all they have is the picture and maybe its filename, what sort of searching can you do?

Actually, not too far from the truth. Do a google image search for genital warts. You know all those spam sites that return "The Best ____" where ____ is whatever your search term was?:) Yeah, they're offering the Best Genital Warts, free shipping, etc. Google's improved their algorithms, but there used to be a ton of spam links in the first two pages of results.

It's useful to have an archive. After five or ten years people won't care about these images any more, and won't have a problem with someone archiving them. Unfortunately, the next five or ten years are the period when these images will actually be available. It doesn't really make sense to wait until flickr doesn't exist anymore to mirror its content.

And come on people, try to think outside of the current month. How ridiculous is it going to look in 20 years that content creators protect their images into

Assuming you're referring to photography, if you take photos of a public park, do you pay the local authority for their work in creating that park for your personal profit? Do you get everyone in crowds you take photos of to sign a model release form? No? Aren't you stealing from them, then?

Maybe the way forward is a photography tax, like a casual trading licence for street vendors.

You know nothing of my work, yet you accuse me of stealing. Your assumptions are wildly incorrect. You've used the reply as your basis to blather your inability to grasp professional and personal photography, models and their rights, and the role of objects in photography all in one mad dash that adds the idea of a photography tax. Good Friday for you.

Exactly. As a photographer it's my responsibility to archive my negatives/chromes/digital files. I'm certainly NOT using Flickr as an archive. I'm definitely NOT putting print resolution files out there for the world to download either. Generally I'm ok with the average person seeing my image and using it in a non-commercial way, such as a desktop wallpaper or to just enjoy looking at. It's why I put it out there. To be seen and enjoyed.
I think the parent is wrong to say that these images won't matter in 5-10 years. Different images will withstand the test of time for different reasons. One good example would be of photos of the Word Trade Towers circa 2000. 10+ years later, and you're not getting another new photo.
These guys have effectively robbed photographers of their control over their images and the kiss to go along with this screwing is that you have to ask them to take the images down. That's like some guy stealing my bike and then having to go ask him for it back.

Heck, I'd pay them to retrieve the ~20GB worth of personal pics I've posted to the web on my home server if my RAID array suddenly went south, along with the partial backups I've transferred to various friends and relatives.

It seems logical to have a black (or at least grey) market for this kind of thing.

In the end, we're all content aggregators in some form or another... as long as they're not destroying the original works (say, by failing with attribution), then I say archive away.

I'm not sure why you say that. Certainly both are problematic but I'd say the copying of the images are the worst of the two. If they just put the original url in an IMG tag and didn't provide a link back, while bad, it wouldn't be as bad. It lets you retain a certain degree of control (even though they are leeching of your bandwidth) and might (I say might) even be perfectly legal.

As someone who hosts content on Flickr, I can say with absolute certainty that I find it a lot more annoying when someone co

Like I said in the post above yours, my primary problem is that they aren't including origin links. In the case of my own site, for example, I get most of my images from either Wikipedia, IMDB, or some other large website that uses industry-provided screenshots/pictures. If it comes from a gaming site that took the screenshot themselves, there is almost always a watermark on the image indicating where I got it from.

You have no right to redistribute another persons original works without prior authorization by the original creator or someone who has been given that right through licensing from the original creator.

You can link back to their original source, and you may be able to create a reduced quality copy for non-profit educational purposes, but that is about it without going through extra effort.

Context also matters. A picture from my collection means something different in the context of my other pictures and my site in general than it does as a stand-alone picture. Off of my site, I can't control that context.

There's also copyright issues: when you (illegally) copy my pictures and put them on your site without comment or notice, other people are liable to expect that they are free to use howsoever they chose. Imagine having a picture of you, ripped from your site, appear in a political ad for

Wait...is this a case where anti-copyright people are complaining about someone stealing their stuff?

Where did you see the word "stealing"? All I saw were complaints that a company was illegally copying and reproducing images in violation of copyright law. I'm not sure where you get the idea that the people posting comments here are "anti-copyright" either, although personally I'm in favor of a lot of copyright reform.

I highly doubt that the majority of Slashdot, who are largely developers who rely on copyright's protections for their income, say that copyright should not exist. Software patents, however, are a different matter. Get it right.

I believe copyright has merit. However, I believe that if a web server responds to a request, the web server has implicitly granted full rights to the data. If you want protection, ensure your web server responds accordingly. Require something like a X-Not-For-Redistirbution header to be set before responding to the client, if you are concerned about what is going to happen with the data later. That ensures that the client is aware that there is limitations to the data.

Parent is not insightful; it's a troll. Downloading illegally is not even in the same league as downloading and then republishing without even identifying the author, no matter how much the RIAA/MPAA want you to believe otherwise.